When Google purchased YouTube for $1.65bn in late 2006, some wondered whether the acquisition would be the Web 2.0 equivalent of Yahoo's ill-fated billion-dollar purchase of Broadcast.com during the first .com boom.

It was hard not to be somewhat skeptical: YouTube was an expensive operation to run and was facing the same type of legal assault from Hollywood that basically killed Napster 1.0 years earlier.

Despite its many critics, television advertising is a $100bn-plus a year market. So it's not entirely surprising that the market for online video ads has evolved to look a lot like its offline counterpart.

In late 2011, Google announced that it would invest $100m in developing original content for YouTube. The idea: team up with the most promising homegrown YouTube sensations, Hollywood studios, celebrities, brands and agencies to answer the question, "What comes after television?"

Hollywood may not have a reputation for embracing new channels, but it's increasingly clear that new channels have the ability to help Hollywood's biggest companies succeed as consumers use technology to interact with content in new ways.

A mere decade ago, the water cooler was still the ideal place to discuss the movie you saw over the weekend or the TV show you watched last night. But with the rise of social media, the water cooler is, for many viewers, online.

When it comes to talking about the latest happenings on the big screen and the small screen, connected devices are creating an entirely new dynamic, one in which viewers talk about the content they're consuming with large audiences in real-time.

Parts of the internet will go black tomorrow. From Wikipedia and Reddit to the Cheezburger network and Major League Gaming, numerous highly-trafficked web properties say they'll shut down to protest the SOPA legislation that would make the internet far less free in the name of fighting piracy.

Is Yahoo a media company, or a technology company? It's a question the company has long struggled with.

If you look at the recent appointment of former PayPal president Scott Thompson as CEO, you might suspect that Yahoo is aiming to be a technology company once again.

After all, Thompson was once PayPal's CTO, a VP of technology solutions at a Visa subsidiary and a CIO at Barclays.

But the fact that Thompson is a technologist doesn't mean that Yahoo is ditching its Hollywood connection, cemented during Terry Semel's reign, either. In fact, it's upping the ante with a deal that will see it distributing exclusively a new animated sci-fi series.